I had a machine running 6.0 (Venus) successfully. After several moderate
successes upgrading to 7.0 I tried this one.
1. The install procedure wrapped around itself in DiskDrake. I tried to do an
upgrade and kept being told that /usr had 86 Mb too little. I then started
again booting from CD and expanded the /usr partition since / was big enough
tpo contain the /var partition following /usr. I deleted /var and resized /usr
to contain the old /usr and /var, resigning myself to an install, but having
most of what I wanted to keep in /home and /usr/local partitions anyway
Now, after Diskdrake wrote to disk... A problem appeared. Itr said the
partitions were overlapping. I looked and backed up and tried again... Same
result--overlapping partitions. I rebooted and smacked into a wall trying to
install because the partition table was corrupt. I booted a floppy and checked
with fdisk, and they WERE. It wasn't a false read, it had been a bad write.
Well I wanted to see if the program would fix it, so I deleted those
partitions, and the offending overlapping ones, and repartitioned using
DiskDrake. That worked, and the install proceeded.
We got to video.... Oooops. Nothing would work. THis was working fine under
XFree86-3.3.4.... A trident 3DImage975 AGP card with 4Mb. Finally, I selected
"Quit" after trying everything from 1154 at 32bpp to 640 at 8bpp, and I told it
to remember the 640x480 at 8bpp. I stupidly allowed it to set runlevel 5, but
remembered in time to type "linux 3" at boot. After adding
Option "noaccel"
to /etc/X11/XF86Config with vi, I tried startx and had a screen.
Unfortunatewly this one had a glide pad and it is annoying to have to hold
alt, click the left mouse button, and use a "{free}" finger to slide the box
around so you can click what you want.
Anyway, I managed to get four resolutions working--all under no acceleration.
1154 at 32 bpp (roughly the size of a postcard on my NEC 3V 15" monitor),
640x480 at 24bpp, with Netscape in glorius monochrome, 640x480 at 32bpp and
that was about 10% larger than a postcard under my best monitor adjustments.
I cannot reinstall Xfree86-3.3.4 because something in initscripts needs a
higher number. I will write a script to strip XFree86-3.3.6 and rpm in
XFree86-3.3.5 and offer ti to all. It is true that under XFree86-3.3.5 every
Trident Micro 3DImage (975 or 985) card I have tried has refused to work
properly until I hand-added the "noaccel" option.
I do note that the latest version of XF86Setup does allow the inclusion of
lines in the XF86Config file from the setup routine. I like it, but it did no
better than Xconfigurator.
Civileme
